Concrete Dumping – Redux

I stopped by the 2nd St. site where an F.H. Stickles Concrete truck was seen a couple weeks ago dumping waste concrete on public land next to a stream a bare 100 yards from the Hudson River. This inspired to earlier posts here: Concrete Dumping – more than a local Hudson nuisance and Dumping Concrete: a law of capitalism in action – a local example.

New signs have appeared to discourage this unfortunate practice. Presumably the city put them up?

Dumping Concrete: a law of capitalism In action – a local example

Thanks to GossipsOfRivertown for the image.

The May 3rd post “Unbelievable” on our favorite local blog GossipsOfRivertown.blogspot.com caught our attention. This F.H.Stickles concrete truck dumping waste concrete next to a stream running into the Hudson River is a local demonstration of one of the central laws of capitalism.

For more pictures of this incident go here.

Every company seeks to get someone else to pay for as many of its costs of doing business as possible. The laws of capitalism require this. If all of Stickles’ competitors are similarly avoiding the costs of disposing of their waste concrete they must do likewise. Otherwise their cost of doing business would be higher. In the short term their profits will be lower. In the longer term they will be forced out of business because they will have to charge higher prices. This is so regardless of the moral values or sense of community of the owners of F.H.Stickles. This how capitalism works.

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Concrete Dumping – more than a local Hudson nuisance

Thanks to GossipsOfRivertown for the image.

Carole Osterink reported in her post “Unbelievable” on May 3rd about the dumping of waste concrete by F.H.Stickles Concrete on a site off north 2nd Street adjacent to a small stream that drains into the Hudson River perhaps a hundred yards away. 

This practice is in violation of state and Federal regulations of concrete washouts of concrete trucks and other equipment used to deliver concrete at constructions sites. A quick internet search found EPA guidelines as well as NYS regulations about the handling of this hazardous waste.

Here is more from engineers in Wisconsin: “Why concrete washout is harmful to the environment

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BEHEMOTH (BEI XI MO SHOU) at TSL Hudson

This 2015 movie by Chinese director Liang Zhao is filled with great cinematography and sounds. It trades back and forth between scenes of enormous horizon gulping coal mines, under ground mines, iron making, and ends with scenes of a ghost city filled with enormous apartment blocks in a newly developed but vacant city West of Beijing. But, the most arresting part of the movie is its focus on the workers, men and women, in this relentlessly grim, polluted environment. The only narration is text read over scenes with a nude figure huddled on the ground in front of this devastation. It alludes to Dante’s Inferno.

Behemoth is a refresher course on why capitalism, whether in its American or Chinese variant, needs government regulation, strong regulation to prevent this egregious exploitation of the earth and mankind. Of course this presumes the government is in the hands of the people and nota tool of the rich and corporations. Therein lies the crisis.

The movie runs at TSL over this weekend and the two following. Here is TSL’s calendar.

Also playing at TSL is I Am Not Your Negro, the wonderful, challenging movie about James Baldwin.